Banner and Award Badges in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Introduction to Award ribbons and banners in Adobe Illustrator: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch Make Banner Award images. In this class, we're going to make a ribbon banner and a series of border effects that together make really cool award style images. We'll start by making a simple ribbon banner and we'll save it for reuse. Then we'll make a range of circular awards focusing on some interesting edge effects, including one which is a cutout edge effect. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started working on banners and borders in Illustrator. 2. Award ribbon banner - Part 1: We'll start with making our banner image, so I'm just going to open a new document here. You have a template that I'm going to use that just has my colors already in place. I'm going to drag out a rectangle and this is going to be the foundation of my ribbon. I want to fill it with a fill color and I don't want it to have any stroke at all. I'm going to turn the stroke off and I'm going to go and get a fill color that I'm going to use. I'm going to make this a green banner, so I'm going to settle on this green for the fill color. I'm going to make a duplicate of this, so I'm going to alter option drag, I duplicate away. Now this one, I'm going to bend, so I'm going to choose object, "Envelope Distort", "Make With Warp". This allows me to use one of the warp options to bend this into a ribbon look. The warp option I'm going to use for this, is going to be "Flag". This is pretty much the flag shape that I want. What I've set this tow is horizontal and it's somewhere around 50 percent. You can wind it back a little bit if you wanted to bit flatter or take it a bit higher if you wanted, not so flat, a little bit more bend. But I'm pretty happy with something that looks like this, so I'll click, "Okay". This is a object which has a warp on it, so to turn it into just a rectangle that has a bend, I need to expand it. I'll choose "Object" and then "Expand", and I'll click "Okay". You'll see that it's got lots and lots of anchor points on it, way too many for us to be bothered with. So I'll choose "Object", "Path", "Simplify". This allows me to reduce the number of points along the path. This is what the original looked like. I have the curve precision set to 50 percent, and the angle threshold set to zero. I'm getting pretty much the same shape as I had before, but with only seven points instead of 258, so I'm just going to click "Okay". That's a nice, easy way to simplify your paths when you need to. Now this is going to be the ribbon ends, but it's way too long right now, so I'm just going to shorten it up. I also want to add some extra anchor points around it. When I select on it, I can add anchor points by choosing "Object", "Path", and then "Add Anchor Points". That will add an anchor points to the middle of each edge. It just makes life a little bit easier because I'm just going to grab the anchor point on this side here and just pull it in. I'm doing that with the direct selection tool. This is now my shape and I want to bend it too, so I'm going to use another one of those warps, "Object", "Envelope Distort", "Make With Warp". But I don't want to use the flag because that's an up and down bend. Instead, I want to use the rise one. I'm just going to click on rise here, you can see that that gives me just a bend in one direction, so I can take it up or down. I'm thinking this looks pretty good, so I'm going to click "Okay", more so going to bring it in a little bit because it is still a bit long. But of course this also is a warped shapes, so we need to expand it, "Object", "Expand", click "Okay". Then we need to simplify it. "Object", "Path", "Simplify". Again, we're down to seven points here now, I'm not sure that this is quite the right shape for me, so I'm just going to bring it up here and I can square off the ends here. I think that might look a little bit better and I'll click "Okay". This shape is going to go on this end of the ribbon, and I need one for over here, so I'm going to make a duplicate of it, but I also want to flip it at the same time so I can do that in one step by object transform, and what I wanted to do is reflect. I'm going to reflect this across the vertical. If I click on "Preview", you'll see what the vertical reflection looks like. I'm going to click "Copy", and that gives me one of each. Now this one, I want to flip as well horizontally, so I'm just going back to "Object", "Transform", "Reflect". This time I'm going to flip it horizontally, but I don't want to make a copy because I've already got the piece I wanted, just going to click "Okay". Now let's just move these roughly into position. I'm going to take each of these spaces and color them a different color. I want them to be darker. So I'm going to go and get the color that they already are, and I'm just going to drag down to get a darker version of it. I'm going to drag that into my swatches so I can use it again any time. Again, I'm just going to color this pace. Now the ribbon ends are in front of the ribbon when it should really be behind it. I'm going to the last pallet and let's just drag this out. I'm also going to make this a bit bigger, so I'm going to the Fly out menu here. I'm going to "Panel Options", and I'm going to make these large so we can see things clearly. Now when I open up each of these groups, you'll see that there's just one object in each of these groups. In other words, the groups are a total waste. I'm just going to pull these objects out of the groups, when a group is empty, it just disappears entirely. I've simplified my layers palette, and that's really important if you don't keep an eye on your layers palette and it starts to get really, really full of stuff, you're just going to lose control of everything. I'm just going to drag the big ribbon over the top of the ends. Now we need to just build in the very end bits. For this, I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to use the "Dreaded Pen tool", but it's pretty simple what we're going to do here. What I want to do is, I want to join this end to this end. I'm just going to click and drag at this point, and I'm going to click and drag from this point because I want a nice bendy bit. Now you can see how the line is coming with me. If I want to bend it around here, I'm going to hold down the Alt or Option key and just drag on this handle sites along the line of the ribbon edge here. I'm just going to go down here, making sure that I've got a really nice line down here. I'm going to click around, and backup to this corner, I'm going to double-click on that endpoint just to make sure I've closed that path. This, I want to be a really dark color. Again, I'm going to double-click on this color, going to take the same color as I'm working in and find a really dark version of it. I'm also going to move this path, If needs to be behind this front ribbon, but in front of this one. I'm just going to move it down one step here in the last pallet, and that's where it is. That's exactly where it should be. I'm going to just save that color though, so I'm just dragging and dropping it into the swatches panel here so I can save it. Let's go and do this ribbon thing on the other end, Control or Command, Zero to zoom back out, I'm going to zoom into this end here. If I hold the space bar, I can just drag everything into position so I can see what I'm doing. What I need to do is to join this point to this point. I'm going to click and drag, and I am going to click and drag down here and make it a nice bend. Now, you can see that the pen tool is coming with me, but it's not a particularly good line. So I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and just drag this handle around so that it lines up with the very edge of the shape underneath. Now I can go up here and just make the final shape. Not worried about what this shape is, I just need to keep it inside this lighter green area, and I'm going to click back on the starting position. Once I've done that, I'm still using the color that I had selected, so that's just fine. Let's Control or Command Zero to zoom back out, we just need to drag this below that top ribbon. This is a ribbon that we can use for our award banners. If we're going to put it on and award banner, we can either put it over the top or we could be a little bit more careful about this, and put this over the top of our circle and they spits below. If we were going to do that, this is going to be the top pace and I'm just going to label it top so I working with. I'm going to take all these other paces here, and I'm going to group them, so choose "Object", "Group". I'm going to call this group, Bottom. Now having gone to all the trouble of creating this ribbon, I would like to save it so I can use it over and over again, so I'm going to add it to the Symbols. What I'm going to do now is click on the first symbol, Shift click on the last because I want to drag all of those into the trash can. I want to put my paces in there in place of it. I'm going to take this top pace and drag and drop it into the Symbols Library, and I'm going to click "Okay", and it's now a symbol. Then I'm going to go out and get the bottom pace and do the same thing. Drag and drop it into the Symbols Library. Click "Okay". Now in the Symbols Library, I'm going to select both of these pieces. I'm going to save them so I can reuse them anytime in future. "Save", "Symbol Library". I'm just going to call this, banner 2, because I've already made banner 1, and I'll click "Save". Now these paces, I don't want them to be linked to the symbol anymore, I want them to be independent. I'm just going to select them both, and click here on the brake linked to symbol. That just makes some shapes the way they were in the first place. So we made them into symbols so that we could save them, and then we've broken the link again, so they're just normal shapes. We can work with them as we would any shape in Illustrator. There's our ribbon in the next video let's go ahead and start making some circles to go in it. 3. Award ribbon banner - Part 2: Let's start by making a simple circular design to go inside this ribbon. For now, I'm just going to move the ribbon down to the bottom of the document and just lock it so that it can't be moved. Going to re-select my layer, I'm going to the "Ellipse" tool, and I'm going to hold the "Shift" key as I drag out a circle. You'll need to have the layer selected because if you try and select a locked layer and draw on it, you won't be able to, so just be aware of that. I want a color to go in here, so let's just go and find something a little bit lighter. Here's the light color. I'm going to put a stroke on these so let's just go and get a nice stroke color for it, a much darker stroke color. The effect that we're going to create for this circle is going to be entirely built up in the appearance panel. I'm gonna click on the "Appearance Panel" to display it. If you can't see yours, go to "Window" and select "Appearance". Now, if you haven't worked with the appearance panel very much before, this is going to be a crash course in it. What I've got here is a one-point stroke, and I'm just going to increase my stroke weight to five points, actually, probably about seven. What I want to do is to put it another stroke inside this one. I could do it with another circle, but all I'm going to be doing is ending up with lots and lots of circles. It would be much better if we could apply it to this current shape. We do that by clicking here on the "Add New Stroke" button. We're adding a second stroke, which was also seven points and it's right on top of the first, so we can't even see it. Firstly, I'm going to reduce it's size to about two points, so it's very small. It's the color I want to use, but it's not in the right position. What we're going to do is move it into the right position and we do that with "Effect", "Path", "Offset Path." This allows us to offset a path to move it in or out from the current position. Going to click on "Preview." The default is to move it outside 10 pixels. Well, I want to move it inside, about seven or eight pixels. I'm just going to adjust this value until it's into position. I've got it at minus nine pixels, I think that's a good setting for this, and I'll click "Okay." I want to add this again, so I want another narrow line and then followed by a thicker line. I'm going to take this narrow line, I'm going to drag and drop it onto the new icon, and that duplicates it, it puts it right over the top of where it is right now. Well, it's the right color and the right thickness, but it's not in the right place. But it already has this offset path effect applied to it. I'm just going to double-click that to open up the offset path dialogue. But unfortunately, I've de-selected my shapes, so I just need to go and select my shape before I do that. Let's go and duplicate that line again. I'll double-click "Offset path." You'll know if you've got it wrong, if you haven't got the shapes selected because you won't have a preview, and you need the preview because you need to know where you're putting it. I'm just going to continue and decrease it's offset value. If I press "Shift" and "Down Arrow," I'll move at 10 pixels at a time. If I just press the "Down Arrow" key, I'm going to move it one at a time. I'm just going to position it where I want it to be and click "Okay." Now I'm going to duplicate this seven-point line. I'm just going to grab it, drag it onto the new icon. I'm going to open it up, it doesn't matter which one of these seven-point strokes I opened up, I just need to do one of them. I need to move this so I need to select it and choose "Effect, " "Path, " "Offset Path," click "Preview." I'm going to bring it all the away in. I'm going to use "Shift" "Down Arrow" to move it in big steps. Then just the down arrow to move it into position, and I'll click "Okay." There's a nice simple effect that's very easy to produce using the appearance panel. It's a nice starting sort of shape to create. Now, if we were to bring our ribbon back into position, what we'll have to do is unlock it. We're going to grab both shapes and move them up. Then we're going to take the top most of these two objects, that's this new symbol, and we're just going to drag it above the shape. That gives us this dimensional look. Just going to move my path up a little bit. We've got a dimensional look where it looks as if the ribbon is actually wrapped around this circle. There's the first of the looks that we're going to create in the next video, we're going to do something a little more complex yet. 4. Award ribbon banner - Part 3: I've just closed and reopen Illustrator. That's important because I want to be able to get that symbol ribbon back. I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm going to use the template that I created that just has some colors in it,that i want us to borrow for this project. If I go to the Symbols pallet, you'll see that the symbols are just those that come by default with Illustrator. They're the ones that you see anytime you open the Symbols palette. Well, I'm going to click the Fly out menu here and choose Open Symbol Library. Then I'm going down to User Defined. The reason why I closed and restarted Illustrator, was that now banner 2 is available. If you don't close and restart Illustrator, you won't see the symbol library that you saved. Here are our symbols. I can just drag and drop them from the Symbol Library into the document. But this symbol, so they're still linked here to the Symbols, and we want to unlink them so we can do things with them. I'm just going to click each of them in turn, and break the link. Now, they just regular objects in Illustrator. This is just an easy way of saving objects that you want to be able to reuse over and over again. Because you don't have a lot of options in Illustrator for doing that. Now, you can say that they've come in in the opposite order, so they're not in order in the Layers palette in the way that I want them. I'm just going to drag and drop them into the correct order. There's my ribbon. Again, I'm going to move it out of the way for now. We're now ready to go ahead and to create our circular shape here. I'm going back to the Ellipse tool or hold the Shift key as I drag out a circle. I want to fill this with a green color. I'm actually going to go and choose one of these colors, I think the color from the back here, I'm just going to use the Eyedropper and just sample that color so I know that I'm using the right color. Now, I want to put a ZigZag edge on this shape. But because I want to build up a whole series of effects, I really need to be looking at the appearance panel as I do this. I'm just going to go and grab the appearance panel. I'm going to make sure I have my shaped selected. The effect that I want to create is these little ZigZag edges, but I want to do it to the Fill and not the Stroke. For that reason, I'm going to start off by targeting the Fill here. If I don't do that, I'm going to apply it to the entire shape and not just the Fill. That's going to be important because I want to add some special Stroke effects later on as well. With Fill selected Effect, Distort and Transform ZigZag, I'm going to click on Preview. The ZigZag allows me to build ZigZag edges around my shape. Now the size, I'm going to check in just a minute, but I'm going to increase the ridges per segment, because I want quite a lot of these. I'm just looking at this right now to see if it looks like what I want. Well, I think I'm just going to make it a little bit bigger in size just so you'll be able to see it a little more clearly. Just might bring my Ridges per segment down a bit. But you can fine tune this to what you want it to look like. I've got Corner selected, I had smooth, I get smooth edges. If I had Relative selected, I get this look. You can say that you can achieve lots of different looks with this one dialogue, the ZigZag dialogue. I'll click Okay. In the Appearance panel, you'll see that the ZigZag here, is in the Fill area. When I close down this Fill, well, I'm going to select my shape first. When I close down this Fill, you can see that the ZigZag is embedded in the Fill, so it's only affecting the Fill and not the Stroke. If I'd not done that correctly, it would have been up here. If it's up here, it's affecting the Stroke and the Fill and you don't want that to be the case. If you do set like that, then just pick up the ZigZag and just drop it onto the Fill, so you can move these around as you go. What I want next, is another copy of this Fill. I'm going to grab this and drop it onto the New icon and it gives me a second Fill. At the moment I'm going to be working on the one on the top, you can see that each of these have got ZigZag effects applied to them, because we just made a copy of the other one. I'm going to go and get a darker color. What I want to do, is I want to offset these triangles, these little zigzags from the other ones. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to apply a transformation, Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. I'm going to click Preview on. Then I'm going to just increase the angle. I'm going to continue to do that to find the number of degrees I need for these lighter ones to appear in between the two darker ones. I'm just going to test this. This is seven, this is six, this is five. I think the sway point, is probably between six and five, I'm going to try 5.5, and see what that looks like. That looks pretty good. You can actually adjust the angle in half degrees if you want to. I'll click Okay. Now, really what I want, is I want the darker color behind the lighter color, but I put it in front just so I could see what I was doing. What I'm going to do now, is collapsed both of these Fills and I'm just going to reverse their order by dragging one behind the other. Not really happy with the color of those. I'm just going to open up the Fill here and sample a different color for some. Soaking for something that's going to be a bit better here. Like this, I think it's still a bit dark, I'm just going to double click on it and just make it a little bit lighter. The next effect we're going to apply to this same shape, and why I was really concerned to make sure that the zigzags were only applied to the fill, is going to be a dotted stroke. I'm going to go to the Stroke and I'm going to make it white. Well, I need to select my shape first to just be really careful about that because I do it all the time, and just forget to select the shape and wonder why the dots aren't working. If you find that something's not working, just look and make sure you've selected your shape. Now I'm going to increase the width of this, the Stroke. Then to make it a dot, I'm going to open up the Stroke option here and I'm going to use round Cap. In the Cap area, you want the middle option here, and then you want a dashed line. So you're going to click on Dashed Line and your dash is going to be zero. Just type zero in there. Your gap needs to be at least the weight if not a bit larger. I'm going to start with five and just tab away. Let's just go and have a look at this. I'm just going to zoom in. You can see what it looks like. It's not perfect yet, so I'm just going to open the Stroke up again, I'm going to increase the five value because I want little dots, but I don't want them right on top of each other. That's stocking pretty good to me right now. I'm just going to click away from that. But of course, the dots are right over these little triangle edges. I wanted inside the shape. Well, we already know how to do that because we're going to use our path offset, Effect, Path, Offset Path. Turn on Preview and start bringing this value in. That's looking pretty good to me now. I'm going to click Okay. But the dots are way too big. I'm going back to my Stroke and I'm going to decrease the weight. I'm just going to take it down to three. Then I can just click on Stroke and adjust the gap if I need to. But I'm actually really happy with that gap. Inside this, I'm going to put another line, so I need another Stroke. I'm going to go and get this Stroke and drag and drop it onto the New icon. Now I don't want this to be dashed, so I'm going to open the Stroke Panel up here, turn Dashed Line off. I don't want it to be three points, I want it to be a bit smaller than that. I'm actually going to choose 1. You can see right now, it's over the top of the dots. That's a really cute effect if that's what you want, it's not what I want. But just be aware that dots with a line over the top, gives you something that looks like this. Looks like a bowl chain almost. I'm just going to click on Offset Path because what I want to do, is to bring this in even further. I want this line, inside the other one. Then I'll click Okay. Now let's zoom out with Control or Command zero. I'm going to click away from my shape. There's another award shape that you can create using a single shape in illustrated just lots and lots of different appearances. There's another look that you can create very easily in Illustrator, just focusing on the various things you can do with the appearance panel. 5. Award ribbon banner - Part 4: For the next award, we're going to look at re-coloring our ribbon as well as using it to enhance a new shape. I'm going to open up my ''Template'' and I'm going to go and get my symbol. From the Symbols palette, I need to go and open my User Defined symbol library. I'm going to bring the shapes into my illustration; position them, rearrange them in order in the layers here and then select all of them and go to the symbols palette here and just break the connection because I don't want them to be perceived as being symbols anymore. The icon here is no longer enabled when I select them, they're no longer symbols. They're just objects inside an illustrator document, which is exactly what I want them to be. It's going to [inaudible] them out of the way. Let's go back and create another circle. This time, I want a pink color. I'm not sure, I'll use this pink here and no stroke. Again, I want to use these zigzags. I'm going to open up the appearance panel. I'm going to select my fill because I don't want it to apply to the stroke just to the fill. I'll choose "Effect", "Distort" & "Transform", "Zig Zag", I'll click "Preview" on, I want it to be smooth and I want quite a few ridges per segment. I'm just going to increase the size as well, something like that looks pretty good and I'll click "Okay". Again, I want this two layered effect. I'm going to drag and drop the fill onto the new icon so I get a second fill. I'm going to choose a lighter pink color. Again, I want to rotate it. I'm going to zoom in here so I can see my rotation a little bit more accurately. Make sure I have my shapes selected and the "Fill' that I actually want to rotate selected. "Effects", "Distort & Transform", "Transform", turn "Preview" on, and then start increasing this angle. I think for this, 6 degrees is perfect. I'll just click "Okay". Now what I want to do is to put a dot in these shapes and to poke a hole through it. First of all, I want to reverse these fills because I want the lighter color at the back, the darker color at the front. For my dots, I'm going to go back to my "Stroke" and I'm again going to select the color. In this case, because it's going to be a hole, it doesn't matter what color I use. I'm actually going to make it blue so I can see it really clearly because it's not going to be there shortly. I've got a nice size for my line. I'm going to open up the stroke panel, I'm going to select "Caps", I'm going to select "Dashed Line", I'm going to make my "Dash", zero, and then my "Gap" is going to be something larger than my "Weight", and my "Weight" at the moment is six points but I don't think that's going to be enough. I'm going to take that up to; I think, nine points. Now I'm going to keep increasing my "Gap" until the dots are in pretty near the right position. What you want to do is, you want to keep increasing your "Gap" until you get one dot for each bend in this shape. Now at the moment, I've got a "Gap" of 47; if I half that, I would get a dot for every one of them including the ones behind. I'm just going to try that, it's going to be about 23.5 and that's perfect. It's a lot of experimentation to just see how big a gap you need to get that to look exactly like this. If I want to punch holes in every one of these little bumps, I'm going to use 23.5 for my illustration. Your value is going to be different. If I only want to poke it in the dark ones, I'm going to type 47. If I wanted to poke it only in the pink ones, then I'm going to have to rotate this. Let's just see how we would do that. I'm going to take my "Dashed Line", I'm going to choose "Effect", "Distort & Transform", "Transform", turn "Preview" on, and I'm going to rotate this line a little bit. It's going to be 6 degrees, that will allow me to push it into position. If you've got the right number of dots, but they're not in the right place, all you have to do is come in and rotate them until they are. I'm going to poke holes in the lighter pink areas. Everywhere my blue dot is now, is going to be a hole. The way I do this, is I make the Opacity of the blue dots, zero. I'm going to go to my "Stroke", I'm going to open up the "Opacity", I'm going to set the "Opacity" to zero, that just hides some sort it looks like it's not working at all and it's not right now. It's not working until you go down to the "Opacity" of the whole shape and you're going to click on that; you're going to click "Knockout Group". When you have a check mark over Knockout Group, you get white dots here. They're not actually white dots, they're holes. If we put, to put something behind this, we would see it through those holes. Let's go and do that. I'm just going to close this panel down, "Control" or "Command Zero", just to zoom out. Now I'm going to go and get the rectangle tool. I'm going to drag a rectangle over this shape and I'm going to move it behind with "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Back". Now, the rectangle itself has the same default properties as the shape that I had. I'm just going to need to zero those out. I'm going to press "d" for default, and that just sets it to the default options and you can see that it now is see-through. I put a black shape behind it and we're seeing black through the holes in their shape. If I put another color behind it, we're going to see that color through the holes. What we've done by doing this, is to poke holes in the shape so that it's actually see-through. Of course, now that we've finished this shape, we can just go and put our ribbon in place. Well, the ribbon's appeared behind the shape so let's just go to the "Layers" palette and see what's happening. Well, here is the ribbon. I'm just going to put it in front. Now, the ribbon itself can easily be recolored to match this design. I'm going to select the end pieces, click on one, "Shift", click on the other. These are the darker pieces over here. I'm going to select the fill color here and go to my palette. I'm just going to choose a different pink for this. Next up, I'm going to go and get the shadow pieces. Click on one, "Shift", click on the other, and add a much darker shadow to that. Now, select the main ribbon and I'll choose a color for it and then just click away. There's how you can easily re-color your ribbon and we've also this time, created a shape that has some cutout pieces in it. 6. Award ribbon banner Part 5: Now we know that those little cutout bits are a little bit hard to get a grip on the first time you use them. Let's go and create one final shape using that effect, but also another one as well. This time I'm going to leave the ribbon out, but I'm just going to draw my circle. I'm going to bring back the appearance panel which has disappeared on me. Let's just go and get the appearance panel. I'm going to add a fill here and I'm going to choose a different fill and a different stroke just for now. I'm going to make this my fill color. Let's go and add a pink stroke color. I'm going to make the strike quite a bit larger than it is. I'm actually going to wind it straight up to about 35 points. All I want to do is to make a scalloped edge and I'm going to do that with a dashed path. I'm again going to choose dashed line. I'll set my dash to zero and then my gap to something like the white of the line. At the moment it says 30, I'm just going to make it 35. Now the reason why we're not seeing circles, and we're seeing just these little dashes here is because we don't have round cap set on, so these are round caps. What I want here is a slight overlap in my dots and I think my dots is not quite big enough. I'm just going to increase the size of the dots to about 42. I actually think the overlap is pretty good right now. I'm happy with this for my scalloped edge, the problem is that I'm seeing these circles over the top of the fill. I'm not actually seeing the effect of just a simple scalloped edge. Well, we can resolve that by taking the stroke here and dropping it underneath the fill. Now we get a scalloped edge. Now I don't actually want the fill and the stroke to be different colors, but I just want to show you if you did want to make them different colors and you want a scalloped edge, this is how you're going to do it. You're going to need to put the stroke underneath the fill. I'm just going to select my shape again. I'm going to make it the same fill color as the stroke. Now let's go and put our see-through dots here. I'm going to click on the "Add Stroke" icon here. This is adding a second stroke. I'm going to make it a white color. This is not quite white, but it doesn't matter because it's going to be see-through anyway. Now the beauty of trying to line all this up is that most of the work's already been done for us. I'm going to open up the stroke panel. I'm going to click here so that I line these all up and I'm going to have even shapes all around. Whenever you see that slight offset telling you that something's not quite right and these two icons, the ones to test it out against one of them should line everything back up again. Now the gap right now is perfect, so I'm not going to change that. All I'm going to do is change the white to make the dots smaller. I'm just looking for the size dots that I want. Now I've got my dots. They are in fact white or just light gray dots on top of this. They're not going to be see-through. If we want them to be see-through, we have to go through that same process of locating the stroke, opening the opacity dialog here, and setting the opacity of this stroke to zero, that hides them entirely so we're not even seeing them. Then we go to the opacity of the entire shape, which is the bottom-most one here. We set this knockout group on and that brings back the dots. They look white but they're not, they're just see-through. To test this, I'm going to go and put a rectangle behind this. I'm going to click on the rectangle tool. Just drag out a rectangle. I'm going to press the letter D for default colors so that it is set to default colors. I don't want it to have a stroke and I do want it to have a fill. I'm just going to click on the fill option and go and find a fill color. Let's make it a pale green. In the last palette, I just need to drag the rectangle underneath the path. We can say that it definitely has a see-through edge to it. Now when you put a shape like this on top of a solid background, it's really hard to see the very edges of the shape. What we're going to do is we're going to add a glow to add a little bit of distance between the background and the shape itself. I have the shape selected. I'm going to choose "Effect", "Stylize". I'm going to choose "Outer Glow". We're not actually doing a glow per se. We're going to do outer shadow. But the difference between outer glow and drop shadow is that drop shadow was generally only around one edge of a shape and outer glow is around all the edges. I'm going to turn preview on. I have it set to screen here, which is not a good setting because I've got black and screen black is just nothing at all. I'm actually going to use multiply because that's going to darken it and you can see it working here. I think we just adjust the opacity down a little bit and maybe the blur down one pixel and click "Okay". We're going to get a definite distinction between the shape that we've created and the background here to much nicer effect. Now I'm going to add a line in here and I'm going to do it using a pale gray so that can be used on any color background. Again, I'm going to add a stroke. I'm going to make it whitey gray. I'm going to the stroke panel because I don't want it to be a dashed line, so I'm going to take that off. I'm going to take the weight down to a three points. Now it's turned to gray here. But what I'm going to do with the opacity is I'm going to set it to "Screen". It's just going to lighten the background color. Of course right now it's over the top of the dot so I need to move it in with "Effect", "Path", "Offset Path". Turn on preview and start moving it in and click "Okay". If I think it's too wide, I can decrease the stroke. If I think it's too harsh a color, then I can go to the opacity and I can just drop down the opacity here. It's taking on a little bit more of the color that it's placed on. Now, adding effects that you actually want to see like this stroke here, using a gray is a really good choice. Because if I want to change the color of this object, I've got two objects that I need to change the color of, this fill and this stroke. The less number of objects that you have to change the color of, the quicker it's going to be to be able to recolor them anytime you want to do so. You can see by changing just two colors, the fill and the stroke, we've been able to re-color this entire object. There's another effect that you can use to create these award banner circles. This one's got a scalloped edge and a cutout circles. Your project for this class is going to be to create an award ribbon and a circular banner using some of the techniques from this class. Just go and find something that you really like and either reproduce something you've seen in the class or make your own version of it. Post your finished project in the project area. I hope you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about making ribbons and banner shapes and saving objects as symbols in Illustrator. As you're watching these videos, if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.